Tommy:
The Lord of the Rings is the grandfather of the modern fantasy novel genre, and as the Plastic Squirrel has said, it was written during WW II, actually during and on both sides of, from 1936 through 1949. (Use Tolkien's Forward to the Ballantine editions as a reference for dates and also for the postAuthorID's statement that it has no intended meaning and is neither allegorical nor topical).
The epic's time period can conveniently be set in the period before the last Ice Age (some 15000 plus years ago) and can be said to have taken place in the vicinity of Northwestern Europe. (This can help explain why none of the artifacts of the elven/dwarven/human civilizations have been found by archeologists and possibly why only humans remain (in any known numbers), all the other non-aquatic sentient beings, having either died off or gone into hiding. (Of course as the Plastic Squirrel has, time and again, been want to say, "Its not real for *****'s sake! Its only a book!!"; you should take the forgoing with a grain of salt.)

Hope this gives you a little more to work with.
